I've made my first novel, Ventus, available as a free download, as well as excerpts from two of the Virga books. I am looking forward to putting up a number of short stories in the near future.

Complete novel: Ventus

To celebrate the August, 2007 publication of Queen of Candesce, I decided to re-release my first novel as an eBook. You can download it from this page. Ventus was first published by Tor Books in 2000, and and you can still buy it; to everyone who would just like to sample my work, I hope you enjoy this version.

I've released this book under a Creative Commons license, which
means you can read it and distribute it freely, but not make derivative
works or sell it.

Book Excerpts: Sun of Suns and Pirate Sun

I've made large tracts of these two Virga books available. If you want to find out what the Virga universe is all about, you can check it out here:

Major Foresight Project: Crisis in Zefra

In spring 2005, the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of National Defense Canada (that is to say, the army) hired me to write a dramatized future military scenario. The book-length work, Crisis in Zefra, was set in a mythical African city-state, about 20 years in the future, and concerned a group of Canadian peacekeepers who are trying to ready the city for its first democratic vote while fighting an insurgency. The project ran to 27,000 words and was published by the army as a bound paperback book.

Personal tools

Prologue

Pirate sun

“One
thing I can guarantee,” said Venera Fanning. “There has
never been a prison break quite like this one.”

The
barrel-shaped tugboat was so old that moss had spread continents over
its hull, and tufts of grass jutted from its seams like hairs from an
old man’s chin. The powerful drone of the vessel’s engines, as
its small crew tested them, put a lie to any impression that it was
feeble, however. In fact the bone-rattling noise of the test quickly
drove Venera and her small group away from the drydock framework that
enclosed the tug.

Venera turned away from it and squinted past the
light of Slipstream's sun. The city of Rush spread across half the
sky, its gaily bannered habitat cylinders turning majestically among
wisps of cloud. It was mid-day and the air was full of airships,
winged human forms, and here and there cavorting dolphins.

One
figure had detached itself from the orderly streams of flying people,
and was approaching. Venera saw that it was a member of her private
spy network, a nondescript young man dressed in flying leathers, his
toeless shoes pushing down on the stirrups that drove the mechanical
wings strapped to his back. He hove to and she admired the sheen of
sweat on his shoulders as he saluted. “Here's the latest photos.”
He proffered a thick envelope; Venera took it, forgetting about him
instantly, and tore it open.

Her
fingers rose of their own accord to touch the scar on her jaw as she
looked at what the pictures revealed: the planes and corners of a
stone prison that hovered alone in cloudy skies. Not one building,
but six or seven that had been lashed together over the decades, the
blocky, boulder-like edifice hung half-wreathed in its own fog bank.
The blocks, spheres and triangles of the Falcon New Prison were of
various architectural styles and colors, literally thrown together
and hybridized with clumsy wooden bridges and rope-and-chain lashings
into one cancerous monster whose only common element was that all its
windows were barred.

With no
gravity to flatten it, the composite prison was stable enough; storms
were rare on the edge of civilization and there were no obstacles for
the place to run into in its endless drift. The New Prison was a
child of neglect, a forgotten mote on the fringe of the vast cloud of
worker's dormitories, collective farms and planned cities that was
Falcon Formation. Most of the cargo delivered here was on a one-way
journey.

Venera
intended to make an unscheduled pick-up.

She took
a deep breath and smiled up at the courier. “Ask them if they're
ready,” she ordered. “There's no time to lose.”

“Master
Diamandis also sent these.” He handed her another envelope. This
one contained dossiers, but she only glanced at them briefly. “I'll
deal with them when we get back. I want to see this.”

At that
moment the tug's engines coughed and wound down. Venera spun in
mid-air, a lithe movement born from a lifetime spent moving from
freefall to gravity and back again. She glared at the crew, who were
boiling out of the suddenly-smoking vessel. “Now what have you
done?”

“It'll
work!” The chief engineer was practically wringing his hands as he
flew around the curve of the ship. Like any sensible person he was
afraid of Venera's wrath; she decided to show some restraint and
merely shrugged to hide her disappointment. “I'll be back in two
hours,” she said. “See that it's ready to fly by then.”

#

“These
are the players.” Garth Diamandis laid out photos like playing
cards across the tabletop. They sat under gravity, in a set of
apartments Venera had rented (under the name of Amandera
Thrace-Guiles) in one of Rush's more up-scale town wheels. Garth, an
aging dandy who had recently become Venera's closest friend and
confidante, rearranged two pictures to overlap. “Martin Shambles
is a key member of the Aerie resistance. Your friend Hayden Griffin
apparently knows him.”

“That's
no surprise,” Venera muttered. The nation of Slipstream spread in
all six directions from its capital, this city; yet the thousands of
cubic kilometers of farmland and township lit by Slipstream's sun had
once been owned by a rival nation, Aerie. Slipstream had destroyed
Aerie's sun, conquered the country and assimilated its people--so
naturally there were resisters. Griffin himself had been one when
Venera had first met him.

She
appreciated a man who could keep a secret.

“Since
Griffin's reappearance and subsequent second disappearance, Shambles
has been funneling supplies and money to a location in one of the
sunless countries,” Diamandis went on. “If that's where Griffin
took the sun-making devices he acquired in the sun of suns...”

“...Then
that's where Aerie's new sun is being constructed,” said Venera.
She sat back. “Huh! That boy never ceases to amaze me. He was a
good driver back when I employed him. Seems he's making an even
better hero.”

If Aerie
could build and light a new fusion sun for itself, its people might
be able to free themselves from bondage to Slipstream. Venera had
married into Slipstream's nobility, but that didn't mean she had any
loyalty to her new home. After recent events, in fact, her loyalties
went quite in the opposite direction.

“So...”
The deliciously intricate plot she had been gestating now for weeks
had taken a satisfying turn. “Granted the standoff between the
admiralty and the palace, we already have two major players playing
chess with one another's nerves.”

“Three
players, if you count the rioters,” said Diamandis.

“Four,
when you add in Aerie's various non-aligned malcontents.” She held
up several fingers. “Then five, if you add in Hayden Griffin and
Shambles's people. All of their interests converging rapidly. I
wonder when that new sun will be ready?”

“And
then...” prompted Diamandis; he smiled in that way that had melted
so many young ladies hearts in his youth.

“Then
there's us,” said Venera. “All these contending forces
are winding each other tighter and tighter. Rioters in the city, the
admiralty and the palace facing off against one another, and then
this Aerie conspiracy. What they all need is a spark to set off the
powder keg.”

She and
Diamandis grinned at one another across the table. Then Venera rose,
strode to the window, and twitched aside the heavy velvet curtain.
She looked out over a sweep of rooftops that curved up in the
distance, gradually becoming vertical. Many of the roofs were
painted or shingled in patterns; when you lived on the inside surface
of a cylinder, your roof was the most visible feature of your house,
and Rush's citizens took pride in their houses.

Venera
wasn't seeing the colorful vista. “A new Aerie sun!” she said,
shaking her head in wonder. “This is exactly what we need. Garth,
I want you to find out when it's going to be ready. We'll
synchronize our own plans with theirs--establish a liaison, without
revealing who we are.”

Venera
opened the window and leaned out; the rotational winds immediately
lofted her black hair around her head like the wings of a raven. She
closed her eyes at the freshness, feeling satisfied for the first
time in many days. She'd been branded a fugitive in Slipstream, had
been hiding in these few rooms since her return, but she was about to
remedy that situation. A great trap was being set, and all she
needed now was the trigger.

There was
a discrete knock on the door. “It's ready,” said a servant.
Venera sat up with a jerk and swept the photos off the table.

“Come
on!”

It was
strange, being just one mote of thousands crowding the city's
airways, yet knowing that even the rioters who had burned the Grand
Market in Cylinder Two were less a danger to the city than she.
Venera watched out the bullet-shaped taxi's window as all the myriad
details of the city's weightless neighborhoods flew by: food vendors
and craftsmen selling their wares from inside wicker balls--a
veritable cloud of these balls making up the farmer's market; big
nets full of produce (a galaxy of cabbages here, a trove of engine
parts there) being towed by straining jets or tethered albatross
flocks; a quivering ball of water thirty feet across where some
day-laborers had stripped off their shirts and were dunking their
heads and shoulders, laughing like little boys. All these details
outlined in hard-edged brilliance by Slipstream's nearby sun.

At the
moment Rush Asteroid was shading the drydock from that sun. The
silhuetted asteroid was furred along its black outline by the trees
that covered it. A cloud bank had formed in the cooler air of that
long shaft of shadow, and tendrils of gray were closing around the
drydock as Venera arrived. The tug's crew were making their final
adjustments. While she hovered--literally--her eyes played across
the panorama of infinitely-receding cloud and sky that lay beyond the
city. This maze troubled the eye in every direction. There was no
up or down to Venera's world--save for what you made yourself--only
the light of nearby suns providing any orientation at all to the
tugboat’s crew. Even that vanished at night. This lack of
direction made journeys like this one hazardous for even the most
experienced pilot. They made communication over international
distances unreliable; sporadic, at best.

She had
every reason to stay here in Rush to oversee the unfolding plan.
That was the logical thing to do, and the safe thing.

The
little tug's engines coughed into life again. “We're all set!”
shouted the chief engineer.

Venera
turned to Garth. “Well,” she said. Suddenly she realized what
she was going to do. “Take care of things,” she said, kissing
him on the cheek.

“You're
not,” he said incredulously.

“I'll
be right back,” she said in a tone that was simultaneously bright
and defensive.

“But,
this is when we're going to need you the most--”

“Oh,
Garth, you've never needed me,” she teased, and then before
he say anything more, she dove for the tug's open hatch.

“Contact
Hayden! And Shambles! But keep it arm's-length, mind!” She waved
from the closing hatch. “And spend some time with your daughter!
She's still not to be trusted!”

Garth
cursed lividly--but laughed anyway--as the tug spewed exhaust into
the pristine gray mist and soared away. It cleared the girders of
the drydock, leaving behind a slowly expanding galaxy of bolts and
screws, discarded hull plates and bent wires.

As it
followed the long cone of Rush Asteroid's shadow away from the city,
mist beaded on the ship’s nose. Now the condensate rolled along
the hull past booster rockets the size of a man that Venera's team
had bolted to the iron. The droplets crept like a blindman’s
fingers along the links of a mile of heavy chain that the team had
coiled around the tug’s waist. Aft, the drops detached and
quivered in the air like weightless jewels as the vessel faded in the
distance.

Garth
Diamandis watched his benefactress leave with much the same
bemusement as he'd watched her arrive in his former home of Spyre, lo
those many months ago. There was simply no predicting what Venera
Fanning was going to do next and he'd given up trying. So, with a
shrug, he turned to the rest of her planning team, who were milling
about in confusion at the sudden vacation of their mistress.

Garth
clapped his hands loudly to get their attention. “Stop gawking!”
he said. “We have a lot to do in very little time. There's the
Aerie underground to be contacted, and further infiltration of the
pilot's palace accomplished. Everything has to be set up to topple
in the right direction at the right moment.

I'm a member of the Association of Professional Futurists with my own consultancy, and am also currently Chair of the Canadian node of the Millennium Project, a private/public foresight consultancy active in 50 nations. As well, I am an award-winning author with ten published novels translated into as many languages. I write, give talks, and conduct workshops on numerous topics related to the future, including:

I use Science Fiction to communicate the results of actual futures studies. Some of my recent research relates to how we'll govern ourselves in the future. I've worked with a few clients on this and published some results.

Here are two examples--and you can read the first for free:

The Canadian army commissioned me to write Crisis in Urlia, a fictionalized study of the future of military command-and-control. You can download a PDF of the book here:

Crisis in Urlia

For the "optimistic Science Fiction" anthology Hieroglyph, I wrote "Degrees of Freedom," set in Haida Gwaii. "Degrees of Freedom" is about an attempt to develop new governing systems by Canadian First Nations people.

I'm continuing to research this exciting area and would be happy to share my findings.

A Young Adult Scifi Saga

"Lean and hugely engaging ... and highly recommended."

--Open Letters Monthly, an Arts and Literature Review

Sheer Fun: The Virga Series

(Sun of Suns and Queen of Candesce are combined in Cities of the Air)

“An adventure-filled tale of sword
fights and naval battles... the real fun of this coming-of-age tale includes a
pirate treasure hunt and grand scale naval invasions set in the cold, far
reaches of space. ” —Kirkus Reviews (listed in top 10 SF novels for 2006)

"With Queen of Candesce, [Schroeder] has achieved a clockwork balance of deftly paced adventure and humour, set against an intriguing and unique vision of humanity's far future.--The Globe and Mail

"[Pirate Sun] is fun in the same league as the best SF ever has had to offer, fully as exciting and full of cool science as work from the golden age of SF, but with characterization and plot layering equal to the scrutiny of critical appraisers."--SFRevu.com

"...A rollicking good read... fun, bookish, and full of insane air battles"--io9.com

"A grand flying-pirate-ship-chases-and-escapes-and-meetings-with-monsters adventure, and it ends not with a debate or a seminar but with a gigantic zero-gee battle around Candesce, a climactic unmasking and showdown, just desserts, and other satisfying stuff."--Locus